Tuesday, January 26, 2010

Watching train wrecks and cleaning them up

Now I must admit that I have nasty habits. For instance, occasionally I like watching the train wrecks of the blogosphere, internet forums, websites and newsletters. You know what I am referring to: those posts and pages where it does not take a cracked crystal ball to know that things are going to come back to haunt someone or another.

I am not proud of the fact that this stuff occasionally amuses me; I am just stating that I am aware of this personality problem.

I have seen several flare-ups lately. Yesterday, I was reading a post where someone cited a recent blog post talking bad about the Order that they are in. Now I will not go into details, other than note that the post was a couple of weeks old already, and most of us have moved onto something else.

But it illustrates a problem with the entire system. What you say, especially if you write it down, lives on forever. The hottest blog post today (as in the most read) could have been written months or years ago; the same hold true of webpages and articles.

There are also the matter of lectures, newsletters and books written before the age of the internet. If a single copy is still in existence, silly things that were said can rear their head at any time.

The biggest problem with all this stuff is that your ideas and opinions are set in stone.

There are some papers in Golden Dawn that I cringe when I read them. The worldview that was in play were warped, or they were written with incomplete knowledge, but the papers are still there. Some of them are not flattering.

The internet has made this problem worse. Not only do you have to worry about things officially published, you also have to worry about every single member of your Order and circle. All it takes is one nutjob to get the whole lot of you labeled the same way.

It is why I laugh when I see people get on the "let's clean up the internet" bandwagon.

I am not saying it is a bad idea...I am just not sure if people understand how big the project really is.

For instance, let's say I changed my mind about something. Now I am a small petty man with a big loud voice. I have a couple of blogs, several forum memberships, email, a couple of bad websites, and something resembling a printing press; and I am not afraid to use them.

Just to clean up my blogs, I would have to go though over six hundred postings. Six hundred posts going back three years. Add to that the bad websites, the forum posts, and the random email...the task rapidly becomes overwhelming.

Even if I did sit down to clean up my own end of things, it would take forever.

(Occasionally, I will admit that I wonder if that is not the idea in the first place. If someone is busy cleaning up, then they can't annoy you until they are finished.)

I would also have to worry about the fact that someone else might have saved my bad statements, either in pixels, PDFs or hard copies. There is also the fact that some of my articles can not be removed from the internet by me...basically, I would have to file out forms and beg administers to remove the stuff...if I do not have time to do this, why would anyone else have time to do so?

(This completely ignores the fact that many of these articles I am still making money from...another reason why some stuff will never disappear from the internet.)

If it looks impossible just to clean up my own house, then I am not sure that I would hold out much hope for any section of the internet to be cleaned up.

And that ignores the print world which would even be harder to clean up. For instance, a lot of old opinions about the Jews and the Haitians have recently cropped back up from books printed under the seal of certain Orders. And awhile back, it was opinions about homosexuals.

The bad part is not that these Orders published the material, and may continue to do so because of the occasional gem hidden among the filth; it is the fact that people actually believe these really bad opinions.

I do not care how much you think a certain segment of the population richly deserves the disasters that occur to them; I think that you are wrong. Especially when large number of other people are also caught up in the disasters.

Back to trying to make the point...given the size of the task of cleaning up the internet, and the libraries of the world, the only way I foresee being able to remove all the questionable material is to start completely over.

Gone the internet.Gone the forums.Gone all emails and letters.Gone all the journals.Gone all the newspapers and books of the world.

If we want to clean it up, we must destory everything written and start completely over.

About Me

Morgan Drake Eckstein is a novelist and occult writer living in Denver, Colorado. He writes everything from science fiction and urban fantasy to erotica. He graduated from the University of Colorado with two Bachelor degrees (History and Literary Studies). Besides writing, Morgan does photography, book cover and Tarot art, and cartooning. In his spare time, he is an officer of Bast Temple, a small local Golden Dawn lodge in Denver, Colorado (BIORC in the Inner), and writes a monthly newsletter column for the Hearthstone Community Church ("The Open Full Moon People").